Appolicious - There’s been a second wave of Siri clones on the rise this week, with the launch of Evi gaining plenty of attention. While Android users seek their own version of the popular iPhone 4S artificial intelligence assistant, Evi, SimSimi and others have continued to gain traction in the Android Market. Lookout Labs unveiled a great app for visualizing mobile security threats, giving you deeper insight to malware behavior over time. Apartments.com also broke out with an Android app this week, joining the top real estate resources in the Market.

AP - The federal government's plan to expand computer security protections into critical parts of private industry is raising concerns that the move will threaten Americans' civil liberties.

Reuters - Facebook and the state of Washington sued a company on Thursday they accused of a practice called "clickjacking" that fools users of the world's top social network into visiting advertising sites, divulging personal information and spreading the scam to friends.

Reuters - Symantec Corp, the top maker of computer security software, reported a higher quarterly profit and issued an outlook in line with Wall Street estimates.

Digital Trends - Cybercrime prevention solution provider ThreatMetrix has released their assessment of the risk levels associated with online commerce transactions during the 2011 holiday season, and finds on average mobile transactions were less risky overall than transactions conducted from desktop (or notebook) computers. From businesses’ point of view, this means that mobile transactions might be less chancy than traditional online sales; for consumers, it might mean that businesses increasingly try to shift online purchasing to mobile platforms as a way to reduce their risk.

AP - Two years ago, Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom joked in emails with his new neighbors in New Zealand about his bad-boy reputation before telling them his criminal past was behind him and he was coming to the country with good intentions.

Reuters - Australian regulators fined Nokia, the world's largest cellphone maker by volume, for spamming customers and demanded the Finnish firm change its text message (SMS) marketing.

Digital Trends - Security software is an everyday necessity for most people, especially Windows users, businesses, and enterprises. But one of the ironies of security software is that, once in a while, it turns out to be the source of security problems all by itself. The latest instance involves McAfee’s SaaS Total Protection suite, a cloud-based solution designed to provide comprehensive email and and Web filtering along with centralized security management for businesses and organizations. However, McAfee has just had to issue an update to the service to block a flaw that could let attackers execute code on protected machines, and to fix another problem that could potentially enable attackers to turn protected systems into spam relays.

Reuters - Anti-virus software maker McAfee warned that a flaw in one of its products could make customers' PCs vulnerable to attacks in which hackers used their computers to distribute spam.

Reuters - One of the most common sources of computer intrusions has stopped infecting new machines after security researchers working with Facebook released the names of five suspected ringleaders.